The Cosmos Layer 1 Platform for Community Selected Projects Creating True Value — Interview with Dan, Head of Growth & BD of Kujira

What's good in the hood, folks? I'll tell you what. Today my guest is Dan Tanaka — Head of growth & BD of Kujira.

Chris: Hello there. Thanks for sitting down with me. What does "The Cosmos Layer 1 platform for community selected projects creating true value." mean in layman terms? Please explain.

Dan: Hey, so Kujira is a semi-permissioned network. Part of what that means is that our community comes together to vote and discuss on all the projects we want launching on Kujira. This ensures by and large that all projects launching are higher quality than average and can synergize strongly. The part about true value refers to our guiding principles of excellence, long-term view sustainability, low/no inflation, and revenue from usage and genuine adoption.

Chris: Great. What are some unique features of your system?

Dan: Being semi-permissioned raises the bar for project quality. All of our builders have to be voted in–so they tend to really want to build on Kujira. Our on-chain scheduler allows protocols to be designed with much less reliance on bots. There are far fewer wasted transactions and protocols can be designed to operate more efficiently, with fees once required to incentivize bot usage going back to network users. 

Kuijra uses the Cosmos SDK which means projects have easy access to the entire Cosmos ecosystem seamlessly in an environment with proven security and interoperability in IBC. Furthermore, Rust’s expressive type system and Cosmwasm’s best in class architecture can be leveraged to build safe and secure smart contracts. 

Our price oracle is submitted by all 75 validators as part of our consensus mechanism. The prices are measured by at least 3 independent sources as well, guaranteeing reliability, stability, and high quality performance over time. The oracle can be directly queried by protocols in their smart contracts giving them a solid edge against developers on other chains.

All projects launching on Kujira can propose to list their token on FIN, our clob DEX. And as KUJI stakers receive a proportional share of every cent of Kujira protocol revenue, all Kujira projects with tokens on FIN are constantly airdropped to KUJI stakers. This advertising refuses the need for inflationary incentives.

Entropic Labs’ Entropy Beacon is a decentralized source of randomness for blockchain developers. Beacon provides secure random number generation in trustless on-chain environments, the first to do so on Cosmos-based blockchains. Furthermore, as part of our fee grant program, protocols consuming randomness do not need to take on any extra fees or pass them to users.

We also have a suite of highly composable first party products as an App Chain that push us forward. Native Token Generation is a pretty nifty feature as well.

Chris: What is Native Token Generation?

Dan: As part of native token generation, smart contract developers no longer need to handle two individual entry points into their contracts, only needing to design for a native denomination. In doing so, every token on the Kujira network will be a native Cosmos token that can be used to pay gas or protocol fees. This also means that every token on the Kujira network can accrue to KUJI stakers from associated liquidation and trading revenue based on their relative demand and popularity. This also means that long-term stakers are able to accumulate many different tokens DCA style throughout the bear market from staking rewards in preparation for the next bull run.

Chris: Nice! Can you talk about your Assets?

Dan: At the moment, we offer a few key first-party products that allow our users to participate in the decentralized financial ecosystem based on their risk appetites and expected return.

ORCA is the world’s first public marketplace for liquidated collateral. This was our very first dApp that processed hundreds of millions of dollars of liquidations successfully back while we were on Terra even throughout UST’s collapse. We are in talks with over a score of money markets about future integrations. 

FIN is Cosmos’ first decentralized, permissionless, 100% on-chain, fair matching order book style token exchange, with O(1) (i.e. constant complexity) algorithmic scalability. There’s nothing else out quite like it.

BLUE is the heart of the Kujira ecosystem where you can help shape the future of the protocol via governance and stake KUJI in order to earn a portion of every cent of Kujira’s revenue. It also has a nifty KUJI Dashboard, and is where you can swap KUJI, Bridge to and from the Kujira Network, and claim staking rewards; all in one place. 

FINDER is our block explorer, a tool to search for present and historical data on the Kujira blockchain.

USK is a decentralized over-collateralized stablecoin only backed by uncensorable collateral–inspired by DAI’s CDP model. USK is 166% overcollateralized and uses ORCA which has a proven history through one of DeFi’s biggest black swans to settle related liquidations. USK is currently backed by ATOM and DOT, but will also soon be backed by Nomic BTC and Axelar ETH. Both Nomic BTC and Axelar ETH bridging solutions are unique as they are secure as tendermint consensus itself. This opens the ability to acquire BTC and ETH as staking fees from USK liquidations on ORCA. 

THE KUJIRA WALLET is a an upcoming sleek, next generation Cosmos wallet which will be available on various desktop and mobile platforms and which will use FIN in the backend to enable trades. 

THE KUJIRA SENATE is a new powerful governance mechanism that will springboard decentralization and make Kujira substantially more agile.

Finally, BOW is an upcoming powerful liquidity solution that allows for one-sided LP style liquidity inspired from Atrix. Highly capital efficient, IL should be greatly reduced and exceeded by natural fees and incentives provided by third parties.

We also have a long list of high quality external protocols that are launching on Kujira as well!

Chris: How big of a role does the community play in your business?

Dan: Our community is front and center in all of our decision-making. At the end of the day, the thing that keeps us awake at night is thinking about what we can do to best serve them and make Kujira even better. We believe that decentralized governance isn’t a meme. Kujira has quite a bit of community engagement on Twitter, Discord, Telegram, and elsewhere as well. We are already up to 93 proposals on mainnet alone in 4 months.That’s about 3 proposals every 4 days.

We make it a priority to stay relatively engaged with our community. You will see our core team and founders in the community chats almost every day. We believe that personal touch and sustained engagement constantly focused on our roots is critical.

Chris: What is the next big thing for you according to the roadmap?

Dan: As mentioned above, BOW is releasing imminently on mainnet and that should substantially improve liquidity on FIN. ORCA/FIN powered margin positions and perps would then follow building on top of that liquidity base. We are also releasing a bunch of cool Kujira merch!

Chris: Thanks! Where can we follow you?

Dan: The easiest place to follow us is on Twitter or Discord. Our Twitter page has a linktree to all of our socials.Kujira.app is our main landing page and also has links to everything on the bottom.